Nazi Germany Female Sexual Desire and Male Honor

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Female Sexual Desire and Male Honor: German

Women’s Illicit Love Affairs with Prisoners of War
during the Second World War
Article in Journal of the History of Sexuality · September 2017

DOI: 10.7560/JHS26305
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Female Sexual Desire and Male Honor:
German Women’s Illicit Love Affairs with
Prisoners of War during the Second World War
CORNELIE USBORNE
Roehampton University and Institute of Historical Research, London
ss
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I n A p r i l 1 9 4 1 J o s e f B a r t l wrote to his young wife, Andrea, who
sP
was remanded in custody awaiting trial for repeated “forbidden contacts
with a prisoner of war”:
xa
There is not much else to say since you will know yourself that you can
never again be part of my life after your shameful behavior. I wanted to
Te
do everything to make you happy but you deceived me horribly. You
made me a broken man. . . . We will divorce and then you can carry
of
on with your dissolute life. As a German soldier I cannot belong to a
wife who has given herself to prisoners. I hope that the court will find
ity
you alone guilty for our divorce and you, shameless woman, will not
receive a penny from me. . . . I want you to stop your stupid letters,
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it is only all lies.1

ve
Andrea and Josef lived in a village in Upper Bavaria and had only just
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married after a long engagement. On their return from their honeymoon

her life took a dramatic turn: she was accused, detained, and finally found
U
guilty by the Nazi Special Court in Munich of having “grossly offended

the sound popular instinct of the German people” by having an illicit affair
17
with a French POW. She was convicted and given a sentence of one year
and three months penal servitude, a punishment that was usually reserved
20
for the most serious crimes and that prescribed solitary confinement with
©
My thanks, as ever, to Willem de Blécourt and the History Girls—Lucy Bland, Clare
Midgley, Alison Oram, Krisztina Robert, and Katharina Rowold—for encouragement and
thoughtful comments; and to the many other colleagues for helpful feedback in seminars
and at conferences in Britain, Germany, and the United States. I am grateful for the financial
support of the British Academy for research in Germany.
1
Copy of a letter by L.B. to M.B., n.d., Staatsarchiv Munich (SAM), Sta.anw. 9983, Bl.
16. In accordance with the demands of German personal data protection, all proper names
have been changed.
Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 26, No. 3, September 2017

© 2017 by the University of Texas Press
DOI: 10.7560/JHS26305
454
Female Sexual Desire and Male Honor 455
hard labor. Moreover, Andrea had to pay the costs of the trial, and she lost
her civil rights for two years. Thus, in the space of a few days she had lost
her lover, her job, and her freedom; and as the letter above makes clear,
she would also lose her new husband, because he had rejected her as soon
as he heard of her infidelity.
This is just one of 126 similar cases from Bavaria I examined in detail
from the collection in the Munich state archives. They bear testimony, in
often vivid detail, of the fate of young women who had fallen foul of the
Nazi wartime ban on intimate contacts with foreign prisoners. In this article
I will closely analyze a sample of such case studies to discover why and how
so many young German women like Andrea had defied propaganda and
ss
threats and risked the kind of severe punishment she suffered at the hands
re
of an authoritarian regime to enter into sexual relations with POWs. Us-
sP
ing the methodology of the history of emotions, I am keen to learn more
about male reactions to women’s infidelity and how women thought and
talked about romantic love and sexual desire. What light does this throw
xa
on changing attitudes toward female sexuality, marriage, gender roles, and
the espousal or rejection of Nazi ideology? Te
In line with the title of this special issue, this article is concerned with
both transgressive sex, as defined by the regime, and female desire and
of
romantic love in consensual relationships, as seen from women’s own

(and more rarely from their husbands’ or boyfriends’) point of view. In
ity
this respect, this article differs from some of the contributions in this col-
lection and also recent historiography that has often focused on women
rs
as victims of violence.2 A number of important studies of war-time social

ve
relations between civilians and foreigners forcibly brought to the Reich

ni
have informed my work, although they primarily discussed systematic

Nazi terror or the inhuman treatment of foreign workers.3 The topic of
U
2
To cite some of the most important examples: Doris L. Bergen, “Sexual Violence in
17
the Holocaust: Unique and Typical,” in Lessons and Legacies VII: The Holocaust in Inter-
national Perspective, ed. Dagmar Herzog (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
2006), 179–200; Birgit Beck, “Vergewaltigung von Frauen als Kriegsstrategie im Zweiten
20
Weltkrieg,” in Gewalt im Krieg: Ausübung, Erfahrung und Verweigerung von Gewalt in

Kriegen des 20. Jahrunderts, ed. Andreas Gestrich (Münster: LIT, 1996); Birgit Beck,
Wehrmacht und sexuelle Gewalt: Sexualverbrecher vor deutschen Militärgerichten 1939–1945
©
(Paderborn: Schöningh, 2004); Regina Mühlhäuser, Eroberungen, Sexuelle Gewalttaten und

intime Beziehungen deutscher Soldaten in der Sowjetunion, 1941–1945 (Hamburg: Hambur-
ger Edition, 2010); and Maren Röger, Kriegsbeziehungen: Intimität, Gewalt und Prostitu-
tion im besetzten Polen 1939 bis 1945 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2015). The last two also
give due attention to consensual affairs. See also Fabrice Virgili’s fascinating study of the
punishment meted out to French women accused of collaboration with Germans: Shorn
Women: Gender and Punishment in Liberation France (Oxford: Berg, 2002).
3
See, for example, Eric Johnson, Nazi Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1999); Ulrich
Herbert, Hitler’s Foreign Workers: Enforced Foreign Labour in Germany under the Third
Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler:
Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); and
456 Cornelie Usborne
“illicit contacts” has recently received attention, particularly in various local

studies.4 Jill Stephenson analyzed the motives for the often benign treat-
ment of foreign laborers and POWs by the German population, including
sexual relations between them in rural and small-town Württemberg. Birthe
Kundrus examined various persecution practices of forbidden associations
between Germans and foreigners according to different racial, gender, and
nationalist precepts.5 The most recent and comprehensive study by Silke
Schneider scrutinizes the motives behind and the various strategies to
criminalize forbidden contacts, though her main focus is National Socialist
racial policy rather than the motives of individuals.6 In contrast, my own
interest is to explore sexuality as a subjective experience in its cultural and
ss
political context. While violence is not my main focus, it is certainly evident
re
in the regime’s punishment of all those who were known to have ignored
sP
the prohibition against sexual contacts with foreigners. The harsh justice
against female offenders was certainly a form of violence, and so was the
inhuman treatment of those Polish and Soviet POWs whose liaisons with
xa
German women often had fatal consequences. But coercion might well have
Te
played a role within these relationships, too. Women’s own stories of sexual
encounters were often contradictory, not surprisingly, given the context of
total war in a racial state. As will be discussed below, some apparently in-
of
ity
Robert Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy 1933–1945 (Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
rs
4
Bernd Boll, “‘. . . das gesunde Volksempfinden auf das Gröbste verletzt’: Die
Offenburger Strafjustiz und der ‘verbotene Umgang mit Kriegsgefangenen’ während des
ve
2. Weltkriegs,” Die Ortenau 71 (1991): 645–78; Andreas Heusler, “‘Strafbestand’ Liebe:

Verbotene Kontakte zwischen Münchnerinnen und ausländischen Kriegsgefangenen,” in
ni
Zwischen den Fronten: Münchner Frauen in Krieg und Frieden 1900–1950, ed. Sybille Krafft
(Munich: Buchendorfer, 1995); Gerd Steffens, “Die praktische Widerlegung des Rassismus:
U
Verbotene Liebe und ihre Verfolgung,” in “Ich war immer gut zu meiner Russin”: Zur
Struktur und Praxis des Zwangsarbeitersystems im Zweiten Weltkrieg in der Region Südhessen,
17
ed. Fred Dorn and Klaus Heuer (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1991), 185–200; and Antje
Zühl, “Zum Verhältnis der deutschen Landbevölkerung gegenüber Zwangsarbeitern und
20
Kriegsgefangenen,” in Faschismus und Rassissmus: Kontroversen um Ideologie und Opfer, ed.

Werner Röhr et al. (Berlin: Akademie, 1992), 342–52.
5
Jill Stephenson, “Triangle: Foreign Workers, German Civilians, and the Nazi Regime:
©
War and Society in Württemberg, 1939–45,” German Studies Review 15, no. 2 (1992):
339–59; Birthe Kundrus, “Forbidden Company: Romantic Relationships between Germans
and Foreigners, 1939 to 1945,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 11, no. 1/2 (2002): 201–
22; Birthe Kundrus, “Die Unmoral deutscher Soldatenfrauen: Diskurs, Alltagsverhalten und
Ahndungspraxis 1939–1945,” in Zwischen Karriere und Verfolgung: Handlungsräume im
nationalsozialistischen Deutschland, ed. Kirsten Heinsohn, Barbara Vogel, and Ulrike Weckel
(Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1997), 96–110; Lisa M. Todd, “The Soldier’s Wife Who Ran
Away with the Russian: Sexual Infidelities in World War I Germany,” Central European His-
tory 44, no. 2 (2011): 257–78; and Lisa M. Todd, Sexual Treason in Germany during the
First World War (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
6
Silke Schneider, Verbotener Umgang: Ausländer und Deutsche im Nationalsozialismus;
Diskurse um Sexualität, Moral, Wissen und Strafe (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2010).
nocent consensual relationships between German women and their foreign

lovers proved to be highly fraught and may sometimes have been deeply
dishonorable. They could well have made some German women complicit
in Nazi racism, because the liaisons potentially put their POW lovers into
harm’s way, whether consciously or not, and could prove fatal if the men
came from Eastern Europe.
To return to the case study above, Andrea had been engaged for over
eighteen months to Josef, a professional soldier with the rank of sergeant
major. While she lived and worked in a village in eastern Bavaria, he was
stationed in a market town some 150 kilometers to the west. Despite be-
ing separated by a few hours’ train journey, they were likely to have seen
ss
each other fairly regularly on weekends and during holidays. This and
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their long-standing engagement notwithstanding, Andrea started an affair
sP
with a French POW, Marcel Beaulieu. She had met him first in September
1940 in a woodworking factory where she was employed as a clerk and
to which he was conscripted. In her statement to the village constabulary,
xa
she recounted how she had tried to avoid Beaulieu’s erotic overtures. But
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five months later, in February 1941, he had managed, she said, “to talk
me into meeting him at seven in the evening for a date in a little copse
nearby. I went to the forest with my colleague Maria Krauss.”7 This col-
of
league in turn had become intimate with another French POW. When the
two young women arrived in the forest, Andrea explained, “The POWs
ity
Beaulieu and Jarré were already waiting for us. This evening Beaulieu and
I only kissed and cuddled.” Maria Krauss and her POW had remained close
rs
by throughout the approximately thirty minutes the two couples spent in

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the forest. A short time later, the two couples had another rendezvous
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and then again “three or four more times after work in the nearby forest
. . . when [we] also had proper sexual intercourse. Beaulieu put his coat
U
on the ground, and I lay on it while he carried out sexual intercourse on

top of me.”8
17
Just before her marriage to Josef in April 1941 Andrea had bid farewell
to her lover, Beaulieu, giving him a silver bracelet as a “keepsake,” which
20
he had apparently asked for. This was to become their downfall. While she
was on her honeymoon, Beaulieu and five other French POWs absconded
©
but were detected and apprehended. The bracelet was found, and, when
pressed, Beaulieu confessed to his relationship with Andrea; we do not
know what happened to him as a consequence. We do know, however, that
Andrea subsequently admitted in her interrogation the “intimate nature”
of her contact with Beaulieu. She also conceded that she had been warned
by her employer in a staff meeting that improper associations with POWs
were banned and punishable with imprisonment.
7
Interrogation by the local constable, 24 March 1941, SAM, Sta.anw. 9983, Bl. 2.
8
Ibid.
Decrees against unerlaubter Umgang

(Illicit Contact) with POWs
Bans on fraternization with POWs were not new in Germany. During the
First World War the German army had taken 2.5 million POWs, and they
were greeted enthusiastically by the population, at least initially, which
prompted the military authorities to intervene. In 1915 the Supreme Com-
mand declared close contact with military prisoners illegal and punished it
with imprisonment of up to one year.9 This influenced the National Socialist
government, which in a decree on 25 November 1939 also sought to curb
unwarranted contacts with POWs, as indeed did other Western countries
ss
like Britain and the United States.10 Nazi regulations, however, were much
re
more stringent, and the penalties were much harsher. While during the
First World War German women had to pay fines or received jail sentences
sP
ranging from one week to one year for relationships with POWs, the 1939
decree for the “protection of the military power of the German People”
xa
(known as the Umgangsverbot) announced that “anyone who deliberately
contravenes a rule concerning contact with POWs or who maintains contacts
Te
with POWs in a manner that grossly offends the sound popular instinct
[gesundes Volksempfinden] will be punished with imprisonment, in serious
of
cases, with penal servitude.”11 The regime’s fears of close contacts with
enemy soldiers were naturally fueled by the huge population dislocation
ity
during the war and its concomitant gender imbalance on the home front:
nearly eleven million Germans were conscripted into the Wehrmacht, the
rs
German army, over the course of the war, leaving a vast number of women
ve
without husbands, fiancés, boyfriends, or potential sexual partners. At the

same time, there occurred a mass influx of foreign forced laborers and
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POWs. By 1944 over seven million “aliens” were said to have been living
U
in the Reich, among them nearly two million POWs.12 This evoked the
specter of widespread sexual promiscuity and a demoralization of the troops
17
(Wehrkraftzersetzung). As the number of foreign laborers and prisoners in

Germany increased year by year, more decrees and directives strengthened
20
their regulation and control.13 Unlike the Western powers, however, the
9
Heather Jones, Violence against Prisoners of War in the First World War: Britain, France
©
and Germany, 1914–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 51.

10
See Jörg Nagler, Nationale Minoritäten im Krieg: “Feindliche Ausländer” in der
amerikanischen Heimatfront während des Ersten Weltkrieges (Hamburg: Hamburger Edi-
tion, 2000); and Rudolf Asolon, ed., Das Wehrmachtsrecht im Zweiten Weltkrieg: Samm-
lung der grundlegenden Gesetze, Verordnungen und Erlasse (Koblenz: Bundesarchiv Abt.
Zentralnachweisstelle, 1958), 25, both cited in Schneider, Verbotener Umgang, 183.
11
“Ergänzung der Strafvorschriften zum Schutz der Wehrkraft des deutschen Volkes,”
Reichsgesetzblatt 238 (1939): 2319.
12
Herbert, Hitler’s Foreign Workers, 1.
13
New directives were issued on 11 May 1940 outlawing every kind of contact unless
necessitated by labor or military service; on 14 January 1943 an extra clause was added pro-
hibiting sexual relations; see Schneider, Verbotener Umgang, 183; and Kundrus, “Forbidden
Company,” 201, 205.
Nazi regime also feared the destruction of what they called “the purity of
German blood.” The Nuremberg Laws of September 1935 outlawed mar-
riages and extramarital relationships between “full Jews” and persons of
“German or related blood.” But so-called Rassenschande (racial defilement),
both in the popular imagination and in Nazi racial ideology, also related
more widely to sexual relations between deutschblütigen (of German blood)
and fremdvölkisch people (members of “racially alien” groups), especially
from Eastern Europe, and policy makers sought to prevent these relation-
ships at all costs.14 The regulations differed substantially according to the
perceived racial quality of the POWs. Official propaganda portrayed Slavs as
Untermenschen (subhumans) and described them as “sly, brutal and primi-
ss
tive.” Thus, along with Jews, they were said to pose “the greatest danger
re
to Germany.”15 Just as was the case with foreign forced workers, Polish
sP
and Soviet Russian POWs suffered excessive surveillance and repression.
Just like in occupied Eastern territories the official policy was total racial
segregation between Germans and Slavs, although in practice this was not
xa
always possible.16 Moreover, the mistreatment, especially of Soviet POWS,
Te
meant a high death toll in captivity. Estimates vary, but it is widely assumed
that of the five hundred thousand Soviet POWs transported to Germany,
roughly every second one died.17 Both these practices are undoubtedly the
of
reason why Poles and Soviet Russians are underrepresented in my research.

Although there were prisoners from other nationalities present, such as
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Serbs and Britons, French POWs were the most numerous national group,
dominating the judicial files about forbidden contact. The German victory
rs
over France in June 1940 meant an immediate influx of French and British
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POWs into Germany, 200,000 at the beginning of July, 600,000 by mid-

ni
August, and 1.2 million by the end of October 1940, the vast majority of
them French, becoming the largest single group of foreigners in the Reich.
U
The majority of them were deployed to work in agriculture and the rest as
skilled industrial workers.18 Like other Western internees they were kept in
17
special labor camps, but they were granted the privilege to move around
relatively freely during the day. Moreover, many such camps lacked military
20
guards, and since POWs were often allotted work in remote places in the
countryside or in crowded industrial plants, strict controls were difficult to
©
14
On the Rassenschande laws, see Cornelia Essner, Die “Nürnberger Gesetze” oder die
Verwaltung des Rassenwahns 1933–1945 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schoeningh, 2002); and
Patricia Szobar, “Telling Sexual Stories in the Nazi Courts of Law: Race Defilement in Ger-
many, 1933 to 1945,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 11, no. 1/2 (2002): 131–63.
15
16
Maren Röger, “The Sexual Policies and Sexual Realities of the German Occupiers
in Poland in the Second World War,” Contemporary European History 23, no. 1 (2014):
1–21, 2.
17
Rolf Keller and Silke Petry, eds., Sowjetische Kriegsgefangene im Arbeitseinsatz 1941–
1945: Dokumente zu den Lebens- und Arbeitsbedingungen in Norddeutschland (Göttingen:
Wallstein, 2013), 8.
18
Herbert, Hitler’s Foreign Workers, 95, 97, 125.
enforce. As a result, there were plenty of opportunities for Western pris-

oners to come into close contact with young German women, especially
in factories, where both foreigners and German women were assigned to
work, or in the countryside, where women often struggled alone to keep
farms going and where help from prisoners was vital and highly valued.
This close cooperation often ended up creating romantic unions.
Prosecution and punishment practices, too, differed according to ethnic-
ity and gender. Male perpetrators of illicit contacts were treated relatively
leniently if they were Western civilian (Westarbeiter) laborers (who were
generally not punished at all) or Western POWs (who were sometimes
imprisoned or simply transferred to other areas or confined to camps for
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a certain period).19 But in keeping with Nazi racial ideology, for POWs or
re
forced laborers from the Soviet Union and Poland, the discovery of such
sP
transgressions was catastrophic. According to a January 1940 decree, Polish
POWs would receive a prison sentence of up to ten years, but in certain
cases they would even receive the death penalty; only a positive medical
xa
racial report could save them.20 After a further decree on April 1943, So-
Te
viet POWs would lose their status as POWs if they were guilty of sexual
intercourse with Germans, and they could be handed over to the local
Gestapo office for “liquidation.” They were sent to a concentration camp
of
and subsequently hanged, often outside the camp in full public view.21 As
we will see below, their German girlfriends were publicly shamed and often
ity
also sent to a concentration camp.22

Apart from these racial hierarchies for POWs there was also a gender bias
rs
at work in the punishment regime. In a clear sign that the sexual double
ve
standard remained, German women as “the primary bearers of racial honor

ni
and the biological key to racial purity” were demonized in propaganda and
U
19
Here the findings of various historians studying various parts of the Reich differ. In my
research Western POWs were mostly treated leniently, in some cases interrogated but then
17
released (see, for example, Head of Prosecutions, Special Court Munich, 1 March 1940,
SAM, Sta.anw. 9505, Bl. 26a; or letter by W.L. to his wife, 9 April 1944, Sta.anw. 13687). In
20
Verbotener Umgang (184), Schneider mentions imprisonment of three years. Herbert (Hitler’s
Foreign Workers, 128) found that cases from Düsseldorf resulted in an average prison sen-
tence of between two and six years. But Patrice Arnaud looked at eleven files in Duisburg and
©
Würzburg, where four cases ended in mere warnings. See his “Die deutsch-französischen
Liebesbeziehungen der französischen Zwangsarbeiter und beurlaubten Kriegsgefangenen im
‘Dritten Reich’: Vom Mythos des verführerischen Franzosen zur Umkehrung der Geschlech-
terrolle,” in Nationalsozialismus und Geschlecht: Zur Politisierung und Ästhetisierung von
Körper, “Rasse” und Sexualität im “Dritten Reich” und nach 1945, ed. Elke Frietsch and
Christina Herkommer (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009), 180–89, 183.
20
Herbert, Hitler’s Foreign Workers, 75, 131.
21
Alfred Streim, Sowjetische Gefangene in Hitlers Vernichtungskrieg: Berichte und Doku-
mente 1941–1945 (Heidelberg: Müller, 1982), 112; Herbert, Hitler’s Foreign Workers, 75,
131–33.
22
Herbert, Hitler’s Foreign Workers, 73–77. In “The Soldier’s Wife” (269–73), Todd
mentions the use of the “press pillory” in the First World War.
harshly punished for extramarital sex with POWs,23 while German soldiers
were free to form liaisons with local women in occupied France. Even in
occupied Poland and the Soviet Union, where intimate contacts were of-
ficially prohibited by racial legislation, members of the Wehrmacht and
especially of the SS experienced only nominal prohibition of their sexual
contacts with the local population.24 Furthermore, the regime permitted or
even encouraged male promiscuity by setting up state-regulated brothels
for German men both at home and at the front.25 Comparing these policies
to the regulation of women’s illicit affairs with Polish and Russian POWs
makes the antiwomen thrust of Nazi policies clear. As Ulrich Herbert puts
it, “It was inconceivable that a German soldier could have been hounded
ss
through the village streets with shorn head and a board round his neck,
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just because he had had intercourse ‘with a little Polish girl in a little Polish
sP
town,’ as in the text of a well-known soldier’s song.”26 According to my
own research, German women also often faced harsher penalties than their
Western sweethearts. Presumably this was meant as a deterrent for other
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women and for purely pragmatic reasons, because the labor of POWs was
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badly needed. Women’s sentences also varied according to their marital
status. Promiscuous wives received longer sentences than single women.
Adulterous Kriegerfrauen (soldiers’ wives) like Andrea, whose husbands
of
were in the army or, more importantly, fought at the front, were deemed
the worst offenders of all. As a rule, they faced penal servitude.
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The severe punishment for illicit contacts was publicized in public places
everywhere. For example, in the spring of 1940 German farmers who em-
rs
ployed foreigners were handed an information leaflet for which they had to
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sign a receipt. It exhorted them to safeguard “the purity of German blood”

ni
and to remain “racially conscious” in the face of the presence of inferior

foreigners.27 All over Germany posters in factories, in taverns, and in other
U
public sites warned both Germans and prisoners to avoid all but the most
necessary contact and warned of harsh punishment for those who defied
17
these injunctions. Yet this did not stop thousands of German women from
having affairs with POWs, thereby risking their liberty, social reputation,
20
and family fortunes. Judicial records about their illicit contacts show the
extent of such infractions and the harshness of the convictions. Such files
©
have so far not been fully evaluated, partly because German laws relating
23
Szobar, “Telling Sexual Stories,” 149.
24
Röger, “Sexual Policies,” 12–15.
25
See Annette Timm, “Sex with a Purpose: Prostitution, Venereal Disease, and Milita-
rized Masculinity in the Third Reich,” in Sexuality and German Fascism, ed. Dagmar Herzog
(New York: Berghahn, 2005), 223–55; and Julia Roos, Weimar through the Lens of Gender:
Prostitution Reform, Women’s Emancipation, and German Democracy, 1919–1933 (Ann Ar-
bor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 221–26.
26
27
Ibid.
to personal data protection renders access very difficult,28 but, more impor-
tantly, because historians have tended to prioritize the investigation of official
policies over individual experiences. For the historian of sexuality, however,
these records are a gold mine, since many of them contain detailed police
interrogations and thereby furnish us with women’s own stories. There is a
dearth in the archives of files concerning illicit contact with forced laborers
with similarly rich statements; thus, this article focuses on love affairs with
POWs. These records form the most important sources for this article, part
of a larger project examining women’s own sexual narratives in Weimar and
Nazi Germany.29 Judicial papers allow us to gain a glimpse into the often
ambiguous experiences of wartime sexual encounters of German women
ss
with predominantly French, occasionally Russian and Polish, rarely Danish,
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British, and Serbian POWs.
sP
Evaluating the Evidence
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Criminal files about illicit contact, like all judicial documents, harbor meth-
Te
odological problems for the historian, who has to interrogate carefully.
Can statements of the accused be trusted if they originated in the presence
of intimidating police officers who often asked leading questions (which
of
were seldom recorded in the files)? Were women’s answers to these ques-
tions changed as they were mediated by the police scribe and translated
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into officialese? Moreover, these interrogations occurred during total war

and under the auspices of an authoritarian racial state that showed no leni-
rs
ency toward those suspected of threatening the purity of German blood.

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In this climate of heightened moral and political panic, were confessions

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given reasonably freely, or were they extracted under duress, even torture,
as one recent popular history has implied?30 How, then, can women’s own
U
narratives be unearthed from potentially unreliable documents?

I undertook three procedures to bolster my trust in the evidence from
17
interrogations. First, I checked whether there was extraneous evidence to

corroborate the police accusations. Many files indeed contain rich mate-
20
rial proof of the nature and length of intimate relations between German
©
28
German data protection law is very strict: files containing personal data of private per-
sons may not be released until thirty years after the death of all named individuals or, if this
is unknown, until 110 years after their birth. Special permission, often by the state public
prosecutor, is required to gain access before the end of the protection period, and names
have to be anonymized.
29
Usborne, “Imagined Pleasure, Ambivalent Practice: A Cultural History of Women’s
Sexuality in Weimar and Nazi Germany” (manuscript in preparation).
30
Gisela Schwarze, Es war wie Hexenjagd: Die vergessene Verfolgung ganz normaler Frauen
im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Münster: Ardey, 2009). Schwarze’s central argument that many thou-
sands of women accused of having sexual relations with foreign forced laborers were like “vic-
tims of witch hunts in the Middle Ages” is misleading (witch hunts only occurred in the early
modern period) and fails to convince.
women and their foreign lovers, such as handwritten notes or letters and
tokens of affection, such as signed photographs, locks of hair, or other
presents. Second, I looked for a paper trail that might demonstrate that
the statements of the accused did not change from first interrogation to
the subsequent stages of the judicial process. Female suspects were often
interviewed several times to allow the police to amass significant evidence
of the sexual encounters in question and probably also to satisfy a certain
amount of voyeurism on the part of the interviewing officer.31 If a suspect
changed her statements in subsequent interviews to confess a sexual encoun-
ter or more “misdeeds,” I tried to find out what motivated this change. I
looked for but did not encounter phrases by the interrogator that might
ss
have alerted me to possible duress, such as “after repeated and sustained
re
questioning, the accused admitted” or “after impressing forcefully on the
sP
accused how hopeless her situation is, she confessed.” There were quite a
few instances when women had at first denied intimate relationships but
admitted them once they were told that their lovers had already confessed
xa
and had offered details that made their own continued denial untenable.
Te
Moreover, the fact that most female suspects in the files I examined were
first interrogated not by the Gestapo (the Nazi secret police) but by the
local constable (Gendarme) helped to dispel suspicions. Even if the Gestapo
of
became involved at a later stage, as sometimes happened, it made a differ-

ence that a woman’s first and crucial encounter was with a rural constable
ity
whom she often seemed to have known personally or who knew her family
and who was therefore less likely to threaten her during the interrogation.32
rs
My third test related to unwitting testimony. A woman’s statement

ve
appeared more authentic when it contained an unintentional admission

ni
of culpability. For example, women often offered rather naive excuses or

contradictory explanations for their love affairs. In one case a young woman
U
blamed her Polish POW lover for their liaison by claiming that he persisted
in flirting with and touching her (this was a standard excuse), but she sub-
17
sequently admitted that she had soon “freely agreed to sexual intercourse”
and had engaged in it “without defending herself.”33 Another female suspect
20
sought to excuse her adultery with the argument that her husband was at
the front, implying some innate right to sex. A third woman related that
©
she had arranged to meet her French prisoner at night, usually between
10:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m. in her bedroom, which she shared with her son;
but the child, she said, was “at this time naturally in deep sleep,” as if this
could make her infidelity acceptable.34
31
Szobar recounts an “obsessive attention to sexual detail” by police and judicial inter-
rogators (“Telling Sexual Stories,” 158).
32
Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society, 69.
33
Letter by the Gendarmerie to the Landrat, 9 March 1941, SAM, Sta.anw. 10441, Bl. 1.
34
Gestapo interrogation of A.W., 4 March 1941, SAM, Sta.anw. 9984, Bl. 7.
Honor and Shame

Since all files passed these tests, I could proceed to make sense of women’s
own (occasionally their husbands’ and, rarer still, their lovers’) stories con-
tained in them by employing the concepts and methodology of the history
of emotions. As early as 1941 Lucien Febvre suggested that historians could
not understand the past without reference to emotions, “this primordial
interest that I call the psychological.”35 Recently, the project to integrate
the category of emotion into social, cultural, and political history has
grown apace; it was much buoyed by the increasing interest by historians in
subjectivity and human agency in the past. Pioneering research by Barbara
ss
Rosenwein, William Reddy, and others has shown that emotions cannot be
re
understood from the point of view of modern values but depend on social
norms and rules and must therefore be judged within the context of the
sP
society that created them.36 Rosenwein suggests that people lived and live
in what she calls “emotional communities,” social groups whose members
xa
adhere to the same valuations of emotions and their expression, and that
the historian should “seek above all to uncover systems of feeling”; that is,
Te
they should find out which emotions were privileged and deemed valuable
or harmful and which “modes of emotional expression they expect, encour-
of
age, tolerate, and deplore.”37 Ute Frevert has argued that by historicizing
emotion we open up new questions and new interpretations of the past
ity
that help us to retrace facets of the behavior and beliefs of historical actors
who have previously gotten lost in “translating the past to the present.”38 In
rs
the following, I shall look first at the meaning of “honor” and “shame” in
ve
Nazi Germany to make sense of the official policy, as well as the responses
to women’s illicit contacts by their husbands or boyfriends. Then I shall
ni
scrutinize the meaning of “romantic love” and “erotic desire” to probe

U
women’s behavior.
Although no longer readily comprehensible to us today, the emotional
17
power of “honor” and “shame” in the Third Reich was enormous. We can
see how these concepts operated in the letter with which this article began,
20
35
Lucien Febvre, “La sensibilité et l’histoire: Comment reconstituter la vie affective
d’autrefois?,” Annales d’histoire sociale 3 (January–June 1941): 5–20, cited in Barbara
©
Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions in History,” American Historical Review 107, no.
3 (2002): 821–45, 822; Febvre referred particularly to the history of ideas and the history
of institutions.
36
Barbara Rosenwein, ed., Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities
in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); and William Reddy,
The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001).
37
Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions,” 842.
38
Ute Frevert, Emotions in History: Lost and Found (Budapest: Central European Uni-
versity Press, 2011), 10.
and as a professional soldier and party supporter it is not surprising that

Josef would have drawn upon them to berate his unfaithful wife. He called
Andrea a “shameless woman” and himself a “broken man,” implying that
she had dishonored him with her “shameful” and “dissolute” behavior. Ac-
cording to Frevert, shame and dishonor have traditionally been associated
with men humiliated by women through adultery or rejection; a cuckold
often feels publicly shamed and only regains satisfaction through revenge,
for example, by exposing the woman’s deviancy for all to see.39 In my case
study, Josef revenged himself by threatening divorce proceedings and deny-
ing Andrea any financial support.
Josef’s outburst has to be understood in the context of the role honor
ss
played within the Nazi state. The rationale behind the decree of November
re
1939 that criminalized illicit contacts between Germans and POWs was
sP
ostensibly to “protect the military power of the German People,” but in
practice the talk in the administration, in court, or in everyday life was all
about honor and order. As during the First World War, the wartime press
xa
in the Second World War reported frequently about soldiers’ wives “gad-
Te
ding about” and leading a “slovenly lifestyle”;40 this scandalous behavior
was said to weaken the home and military strength, and it was thought to
be incompatible with the honor of the true German woman. Honor and
of
faithfulness informed most social and political structures in the Third Reich.
But crucially, in Nazi ideology honor and shame were also closely associated
ity
with racism, especially the concept of “purity of blood” to protect the Aryan
Volkskörper, the social body. Significantly, one of the 1935 Nuremberg racial
rs
laws was entitled “Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor”
ve
(often known simply as the Blutschutzgesetz—blood protection law). It

ni
prohibited interracial sex in order to prevent Rassenschande (literally, “racial

shame,” racial defilement) and the birth of “mixed-race” children.41 Fear of
U
miscegenation as a national shame was of course not new. It had surfaced

in the nineteenth century throughout Western Europe.42 The Nuremberg
17
racial laws could, however, derive inspiration from a more recent racist cam-
paign in the early Weimar Republic: the so-called schwarze Schmach (black
20
shame) episode that occurred when French troops, including men from
colonial North Africa, had occupied the Rhineland in the early 1920s. Al-
©
leged rapes by black French soldiers of Rhenish women and children sparked
39
Ibid., 11.
40
Heusler, “‘Strafbestand’ Liebe,” 335. See also Todd, “The Soldier’s Wife,” 269.
41
Reichsgesetzblatt, 1935, 1:1146. For detailed investigations of these laws, see Alexandra
Przyrembel, “Rassenschande”: Reinheitsmythos und Vernichtungslegitimation im Nationalso-
zialismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2003); Szobar, “Telling Sexual Stories”;
Cornelia Essner, “Die Alchemie der Rassengesetzgebung,” Jahrbuch für Antisemitismus
Forschung 4 (1995): 201–25; and Essner, Die “Nürnberger Gesetze.”
42
Daniel Pick, The Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–1918 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
a public debate about honor and “racial defilement.”43 The political Right
complained that “our youth . . . is being defiled, our Volk contaminated,
the honor of the German and the white race crushed underfoot.”44 In 1927
the conservative government of Bavaria even demanded that the law be
changed so that the so-called Rhineland bastards could be compulsorily
sterilized. This had little chance of being adopted in the Weimar Republic,
but six years later the National Socialists were to introduce just such a law.45
The symbolic meanings emerging out of the schwarze Schmach debates
also inspired powerful images in the rhetoric around the illicit contact debate
during the Second World War. In the early 1920s white German female rape
victims represented the defiled white race and the violated national body.
ss
During the Second World War convinced Nazis understood illicit sexual
re
contact between German women and POWs (especially from the East)
sP
not only as an attack on their husbands’ honor, their manliness, and their
fighting prowess but also as a racial assault on the purity of German blood.
Seen from this vantage point, Andrea, a German Kriegerfrau who had been
xa
unfaithful with a foreign prisoner, had offended both her husband and her
Te
country. By “sleeping with the enemy” she had also made a mockery of
Nazi propaganda about the superiority of the German “master race” and
had defied government directives; therefore, she deserved the severe penal-
of
ties of the regime. The special court in Munich accordingly declared that
“the accused has besmirched the honor of the German mother; at the same
ity
time, she has disgraced her husband, whom this must have hit hard. For a
German soldier, it is a serious insult to experience his wife having contact
rs
with a POW who faced him as an enemy.”46 Josef was quick to exploit the
ve
emotional culture of honor to get rid of a disloyal wife and protect his purse.
ni
The fact that their marriage was delayed by eighteen months (apparently
because he disapproved of Andrea’s smoking habit) suggests that they had
U
a shaky relationship at best and that her infidelity was simply the last straw.
As a means to restore male honor, Josef demanded satisfaction by casting
17
off his bride without further ado. He would not forgive her nor petition for
20
43
This episode has received considerable attention. See, for example, Gisela Lebzelter,
“Die ‘Schwarze Schmach’: Vorurteile, Propaganda, Mythos,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 11,
no. 1 (1985): 37–58, 39; Julia Roos, “Women’s Rights, Nationalist Anxiety, and the ‘Mor-
©
al’ Agenda in the Early Weimar Republic: Revisiting the ‘Black Horror’ Campaign against
France’s African Occupation Troops,” Central European History 42, no. 3 (2009): 473–508;
John Boonstra, “Women’s Honour and the Black Shame: Coloured Frenchmen and Respect-
able Comportment in the Post–World War I Occupied Rhineland,” German History 33,
no. 4 (2015): 546–69; and Michael Wildt, Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft and the Dynamism
of Racial Exclusion: Violence against Jews in Provincial Germany, 1919–1939 (New York:
Berghahn, 2012), 166–67.
44
This was a motion of April 1920 in the Reichstag by the German People’s Party, cited
in Wildt, Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft, 166.
45
Rainer Pommerin, “Sterilisierung der Rheinlandbastarde”: Das Schicksal einer deutschen
farbigen Minderheit 1918–1937 (Dusseldorf: Droste, 1979), 15–19.
46
Special Court at the Landgericht Munich, 29 August 1941, SAM, Sta.anw. 9983.
mercy on her behalf (as many other husbands did); what is more, he sued for
divorce and declared her the guilty party in order to avoid paying alimony.
The Nazi state sought satisfaction by giving Andrea the severest form of
imprisonment: penal servitude. Just like in the nineteenth-century ritual
of dueling, male honor could be restored only if the dishonored husband
could get rid of his deviant wife, but female honor remained forever dam-
aged. According to the racial ideology of the Third Reich, once a woman
had fallen, she was unredeemable.47
When it came to heaping shame on women who had disgraced the
German Volk, the regime adopted medieval or early modern public stig-
matization practices. Mixed (Jewish with non-Jewish) couples accused of
ss
race defilement according to the Nuremberg Blutschutz law were publicly
re
humiliated, and so were women accused of sexual liaisons with Slav prison-
sP
ers, who, according to the Umgangsverbote, had offended against the honor
and dignity of the German people. They were forced to carry cardboard
posters announcing their “crime” and branding them as “race defilers,”
xa
but they also often suffered tonsure, the public shearing of their hair.48
Te
Tonsure was also the punishment meted out in the immediate postwar
years in France, Italy, Poland, and many other countries to hundreds of
women who had had love affairs with occupying German soldiers.49 Women
of
accused of racial defilement were thus exposed to onlookers and mocking

comments by passersby reminiscent of much earlier honor punishments like
ity
the use of the pillar of shame in the Middle Ages, for example, in Breslau,
where offenders remained in a humiliating posture in the town center.50
rs
Although pillory punishments were outlawed by most German states in the

ve
new civil codes after 1848–49, honor punishments remained popular after
ni
that, as Michael Wildt makes clear, and were in fact used against women
accused of sexual liaisons during the French occupation of the Rhineland
U
in the early 1920s.51 This supplied the National Socialists with a useful
example not, as was the case with age-old shaming rituals, to restore “the
17
good order” that had been endangered by “shameful behavior of individu-

als” but rather, as Wildt asserts, to “realize a racist order in everyday life and
20
47
On German honor codes and dueling, see Ute Frevert, “Male Crime in Nineteenth-
©
Century Germany: Duelling,” in Gender and Crime in Modern Europe, ed. Margaret L.
Arnot and Cornelie Usborne (London: UCL Press, 1999), 173–88.
48
Wildt, Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft, 175; and Herbert, Hitler’s Foreign Workers, 76.
49
See Virgili, Shorn Women.
50
Gerd Schwerhoff, “Verordnete Schande? Spätmittelalterliche und frühneuzeitliche
Ehrenstrafen zwischen Rechtsakt und sozialer Sanktion,” in Mit den Waffen der Justiz: Zur
Kriminalitätsgeschichte des Spätmittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Andreas Blauert and
Gerd Schwerhoff (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1993), 158–88, 174–77.
51
These shaming rituals were also reintroduced throughout Europe during the First
World War. See Ute Frevert, “Wartime Emotions: Honour, Shame, and the Ecstasy of
Sacrifice,” International Encyclopedia of the First World War (http://encyclopedia.1914
-1918-online.net/article/wartime_emotions_honour_shame_and_the_ecstasy_of_sacrifice,
acc 13.3.2017); and Todd, “The Soldier’s Wife,” 268.
ss
re
sP
xa
Te
of
ity
rs
ve
ni
U
17
20
Figures 1 and 2. At 8:30 on the evening of 23 August 1940, two sisters had their
©
hair publicly shorn in front of the Dresden police headquarters while holding up a
sign proclaiming: “I have practiced racial defilement with a racial alien for money.”
Photographic Collections, Dresden Municipal Museums.
thereby create a new form of justice—arbitrary, situational, and supported

by racial völkisch sentiment alone.”52 Such public humiliation of women who
had sexual contact with Eastern European POWs was, however, stopped
52
Wildt, Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft, 186.
in December 1941 on the personal intervention of Hitler, who feared

resentment from German allies abroad for an extreme punishment whose
deterrence seemed, moreover, to be ineffective.53
Romantic Love
There is, however, a significant dissonance between the official and largely
male discourse of honor and shame and the way many women constructed
and narrated their emotional lives in their testimonies, which were centrally
concerned with romantic (heterosexual) love and sexual pleasure. Interest
in romantic love by historians has recently received an important stimulus
ss
by the increasing importance of the history of emotions and the attempt to
re
integrate sexuality and love. But the concept of romantic love is difficult to
sP
define and of course historically contingent. Roland Barthes called it “this
socially irresponsible” emotion, while Ingrid Bauer and Christa Hämmerle
recently suggested that definitions range from a “claim for subjectivity or
xa
selfhood and the freedom to choose a lover or love for love’s sake in the
Te
microcosm of a couple,” to a “very specific emotional arrangement which
was originally linked to an artistic and intellectual avant-garde in Europe of
the late eighteenth century and inspired by its literature.” In their model of
of
romantic love, sociologists have included such characteristics as the “claim

to uniqueness and exclusivity, the connection between sexual desire and
ity
emotional sentiments or the combination of marriage and love.”54 In her

study of romantic love in twentieth-century England, Claire Langhamer
rs
argues that “an emotional revolution [in midcentury] not only predated any
ve
sexual revolution; it provided the necessary conditions for such change.”

ni
She shows how the Second World War helped to transform the status of
romantic love not just among the educated but indeed in all classes: “Emo-
U
tional intimacy became increasingly valorized as the key to happiness, [and]

romantic love was endowed with extraordinary powers beyond material
17
advancement and mutual care.” The war, Langhamer argues, accelerated the
often contradictory transformation of love from pragmatism to passion as a
20
decisive factor in choosing a partner; this was helped by wartime conditions

and because young women had become less dependent on family approval.
©
As practical aspects of relationships receded in the quest for personal and

sexual fulfilment, romantic love moved to center stage. But, as she shows, the
burden of expectation of romantic love bore the seed of its own destruction,
when the famously transient emotion of “being in love” could not sustain
53
54
Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse. Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1978); Ingrid Bauer and Christa Hämmerle, editorial, “Romantische Liebe,”
special issue, L’Homme: Europäische Zeitschrift für Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 24, no.
1 (2013): 5–14, 5; see also Ingrid Bauer and Christa Hämmerle, eds., Liebe schreiben: Paarkor-
respondenzen im Kontext des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
2017).
long-term commitments and led to a rise in divorce and promiscuity.55 But

as ordinary people increasingly put their trust in feeling to make decisions
in their everyday and affective lives, “claims to emotional authenticity could
. . . be used as tools for subversion, resistance and personal transformation,
particularly when feeling, experience and cultural expectation were out of
step with each other.”56
Such transgressive love is certainly typical of what I found in the judicial
files of illicit contacts between Germans and foreigners. They often show
a stark conflict between what accounted for “authentic” personal feeling
and prescribed standards at the time. For example, Nazi propaganda often
portrayed POWs in vicious terms, pointing to the racial inferiority of Slavs
ss
or accusing the French of being “disgruntled and stubborn,” “cocky and
re
arrogant,” work-shy and even violent toward German farmers and fore-
sP
men alike.57 But there is evidence that many Germans thought much more
positively of foreign prisoners or enforced laborers.58 Many women who
worked in close proximity to POWs came to admire their capacity for hard
xa
work, their skills, their good conduct, and their kindness, and some even-
Te
tually developed romantic feelings for them. The attraction of POWs for
young German women was certainly recognized by the Nazi regime, but
their assessment of women’s motives was typically contradictory. Women
of
who had affairs with Slavs were called “racially inferior,” and their behavior
was blamed on their “strongly developed sexuality” and “unstable char-
ity
acter.” Other official observers, however, admitted that “the majority of

women who mix with POWs come from hereditarily and socially sound
rs
families.”59 According to a December 1943 report by the Security Service

ve
of the SS, women who were intimate with POWs were not all “of loose
ni
morals, though this may well be true for the majority. The accused women
include innocent farm girls of good reputation and family background, also
U
soldiers’ wives, some happily married for many years, some the mothers of
several children. In cases where French men are employed in higher posi-
17
tions, then the accused include also stenographers, housekeepers, estate

secretaries and women from the intelligentsia.”60
20
Nevertheless, the opinion was widespread that young women’s sexual

favors could be easily courted with “presents of chocolate or biscuits.”61 But,
©
55
Claire Langhamer, The English in Love: The Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 35, 38.
56
Claire Langhamer, “Everyday Advice on Everyday Love: Romantic Experience in Mid-
Twentieth Century Britain,” L’Homme 24, no. 1 (2013): 35–52, 40.
57
Heinz Boberach, ed., Meldungen aus dem Reich 1938–45: Die geheimen Lageberichte des
Sicherheitsdienstes der SS (MadR) (Herrsching Pawlak, 1984), 1–17, no. 260, 16 February
1942, 3323–30, cited in Schneider, Verbotener Umgang, 240.
58
See, for example, Stephenson, “Triangle,” 342.
59
MadR, no. 287, 28 May 1942, 3762, and MadR, no. 325, 12 October 1942, 4317,
both cited in Schneider, Verbotener Umgang, 246; and Todd, “The Soldier’s Wife,” 272.
60
MadR, no. 6142, 13 December 1943, quoted in Kundrus, “Forbidden Company,” 207.
61
MadR, no. 379, 29 April 1943, cited in Schneider, Verbotener Umgang, 242.
contrary to such official appraisals, my research shows that many women

seemed to have developed a genuine affection for a POW, and some of
them seem to have fallen deeply in love. Many written exchanges between
women and their foreign sweethearts express touching emotions and tender
affection and love, and these are remarkable for originating at a time when
authorities pursued evidence of such sentiments as a crime. For the two
lovers, their discovery brought suffering and shame, but for the historian,
they are valuable evidence, because in such letters and notes women and
their lovers speak to us directly and in ways unmediated by the authorities.
In the summer of 1944 Gretl Schaffer, for example, the twenty-one-
year-old daughter of a well-to-do farmer in an Upper Bavarian village, was
ss
discovered to have had an almost two-year affair with the thirty-five-year-
re
old French prisoner Louis Menage. She had always worked on the parental
sP
farm, but in April 1942 she was conscripted to another nearby farm where
Menage also worked as a POW. As the daughter of a prosperous farmer
her prospects for a suitable boyfriend and marriage were likely to have been
xa
good, and indeed she had two years earlier been “going steady” with a lo-
Te
cal young farmer. Menage, in contrast, was a lowly farm laborer, fourteen
years her senior, and, what is more, he was married with two children.62
Working closely with Louis, Gretl learned to appreciate him as a worker
of
and a man. With time, she admitted, their cooperation “grew into a love
affair,” and her hopes for a long-term relationship were nourished by “his
ity
promise to divorce his wife after the war, to marry her and to settle in
Germany.” He told her, she said, that he had undertaken steps on several
rs
occasions to be released as a POW and become a civilian laborer. After five

ve
months they started having sexual intercourse. When in March 1943 Louis
ni
was transferred to a farm in another village and then in August 1943 even
farther away, they still managed to meet and have sex on most Sundays;
U
their relationship was bolstered through the exchange of love letters via a
cover address. Eventually, he was transferred too far away, and during the
17
rest of the eighteen months until her arrest their affair was kept alive only
through their correspondence. The match between them seems unlikely
20
and uneven, but Gretl wrote Louis at least thirty long letters and possibly
more that have not survived. She in turn received from her lover several
©
photographs and a great number of hurriedly penned notes and cards in

which he regularly repeated his promise to seek a divorce once the war was
over and to marry her and settle in Germany.
Menage’s very rudimentary command of German renders his letters
almost incomprehensible, and the sentiments expressed are marred by the
endless repetition of a narrow range of stock phrases. He invariably addressed
her as “mein Liebling” (my darling) and signed his notes “dein Louis fürs
Leben” (your Louis for life). A typical letter reads (with all spelling and
grammar mistakes preserved) like this: “Min Liebling Jetzt Mittwoch abend
62
Copy of judgment, 27 June 1944, SAM, Sta.anw. 13700.
ich sitzen mein Zimmer jetzt 10 Uhr ich nig finden schlaf ich viel muede ja
den ganzen tag viel . . . ich ganz viel danken fuer mein leibling. Bitte mein
Lieling, du sagen warum nicht kommen du wissen ich ganz viel warten fuer
dich, ich ganz viel Durst und viel Hunger fuer dein Busse warum du nicht
kommen. . . . Ich jetzt Schluss mahen fuer heute gell, Viel viel Busse dein
Louis fuers Leben.”63
Louis’s physical presence and his and Gretl’s intimate encounters, almost
certainly more than his written communications, seem to have fulfilled her
yearnings for a romantic liaison. Her letters to him are evidence of this. They
professed her earnest love for and trust in him. Her empathy for Louis is
reflected in her adoption of his own style of broken German, presumably
ss
to ease his understanding or maybe so as not to appear superior: “Mein
re
Liebling! Mein glueck! Ich ganz viel denken fuer meinen Liebsten, ich
sP
woollen jetzt schreiben ein Brief fuer meinen Liebling, Gestern, Montag
dein Brief kommen, viel Danke, Liebling. Ich gar nicht denken, du so schnell
antworten, ja mein Liebling ich immer wieder sehen, du nicht vergessen
xa
Dein Frau fuer Leben. Du brav Liebling du ganz gut fuer mich, ich viel
Te
zufrieden.”64 We do not know how, but these letters found their way to the
local constable, probably handed over by a neighbor who denounced Gretl
Schaffer. She was prosecuted for illicit contact and convicted to one year
of
and six months in prison. We do not know what happened to Menage.65

Another case of romantic love came to light in Munich in August 1941
ity
when a stash of sixteen photographs depicting a young German woman

together with some fifty love letters addressed to her were discovered dur-
rs
ing an inspection at a POW work camp. The letters were written by the
ve
twenty-seven-year-old French prisoner Jean Grasset and addressed to the

ni
twenty-eight-year-old Ingrid Assmann.66 Again, this relationship was curi-

ously skewed. When Ingrid met Jean she had already been married for four
U
years to an artist who was still completing his art school degree when he
was conscripted into the Wehrmacht in June of the same year. As the corre-
17
spondence revealed, Ingrid and Jean had conducted an intimate relationship

for six months when they were discovered. At first it was simply friendly,
20
but it had become increasingly more affectionate and soon developed into
©
63
Letter, 17 April 1944, SAM, Sta.anw. 13700: “My darling now Wednesday evening
and I sit my room now 10 o’clock not find sleep I much tired since the whole day. . . . I thank
much for my darling. Please my darling, you say why not come you know I wait much for
you, I much thirst and much hunger for your kisses why you not come. . . . [N]ow I stop for
today, yes, Many many kisses your Louis for life.”
64
Letter, 25 April 1944, SAM, Sta.anw. 13700: “My darling! My happiness! I much
thank for my dearest, I now want to write a letter for my darling, yesterday, Monday your
letter came, much thank, darling. I not think, you answer quickly, yes my darling I see
again and again you not forget you woman for life. You nice darling you are good for me
I much content.”
65
Copy of judgment, 27 June 1944, SAM, Sta.anw. 13700.
66
Stalag VIIA, interrogations of A.G., 15 August 1941, SAM, Sta.anw. 10476.
a love affair characterized by sexual desire and emotional yearning. Ingrid

was middle class and highly educated, and she had a professional career
and a good salary as the personal assistant to a boss in a chemical firm in
Munich. She had been financing her husband’s degree. She had given Jean
some of her holiday snapshots, which depicted her as an attractive, sportive,
slim, and smiling young woman. They variously show her skiing, swimming,
hiking in the Alps, doing a handstand in a meadow, and cycling dressed
in a Dirndl. Even though she did not conform precisely to the stereotypi-
cal Nazi Aryan ideal woman, since she wore her hair loose rather than in
braids and was brunette rather than blond, her healthy looks, fit physique,
and evident joy of nature would have done a Kraft durch Freude (strength
ss
through joy) poster proud.67 In contrast, in his small snapshot her beloved
re
Jean appears rather puny and sickly.
sP
It is not obvious what had motivated Ingrid to pursue her erotic escapade.
Why did she risk her marriage, her job, and her reputation by bestowing
her love on a foreign prisoner who appeared worn out, was her social infe-
xa
rior (he was a train driver), and was one year her junior? My suggestion is
Te
that she craved romantic love and sought it out where it seemed possible.
Ingrid’s attraction to Jean was, in her own words, a slow process. After two
French POWs arrived to work in her firm, she showed them both kindness
of
by giving them cigarettes and other small presents. She also liked talking to
them in French in a “playful manner.” She wrote them a note explaining, as
ity
she reported later, that “they are our enemies, but that nevertheless I like
them as human beings.” Under interrogation, Jean reported that Ingrid
rs
soon singled him out for special attention by sending him a note in French:
ve
“The spring has come and I wish you much happiness in the future.” When
ni
criticized by her boss for her fraternizing she promised to stop it. But when
she received a letter from Jean expressing his love for her she replied eagerly,
U
and they started to correspond at least twice weekly, always handing over
letters in person. She admitted that “a love relationship” between her and
17
Jean soon developed and that she “did not resist” when Jean kissed her for
the first time. But she said she liked his letters so much that she “finally fell
20
in love” with him. In these letters he would address her as “ma petite Ingrid,
chérie, mon doux trésor” (my little Ingrid, my dear, my sweet treasure)
©
or “mon cher bon ange—ma chère petite aimée Ingrid” (my dear good
angel, etc.). He skillfully reminded her of their erotic encounters, “sweet
tête-a-têtes,” how he held her in his arms and how his “mouth felt on her
warm little mouth.” Jean always ended his letters with exquisite flourishes,
such as “reçois ma bien aimée, avec toute la douceur des fibres de mon
coeur” (receive, my dear love, with all the sweetness of the fibers of my
heart), sending her a thousand sweet kisses for “mon amour, Chérie, tu es
67
Kraft durch Freude was a very large tourism operator under the auspices of the German
Labour Front whose purpose was to make travel available to everyone and to promote the
benefits of National Socialism.
ma petite Ingrid bien aimée” (my love, dear, you are my little Ingrid, well
loved). He signed with affirmative declarations of love, such as “ton petit
Français qui t’aime pour la vie, Jean” (your little Frenchman who loves you
for life).
Every time Ingrid and Jean exchanged their notes they would embrace
and kiss. They also contrived to meet on Sundays somewhere private where
they could talk and cuddle. But Ingrid set firm boundaries for Jean’s sexual
overtures. In her police interrogation she recounted that when he tried to
“lift my skirt to touch my genitals” she had fought him off and run away.
In one of her letters to Jean she explained: “Sexual intercourse is not pos-
sible as long as you remain a prisoner. But I promise you that once you are
ss
free, we can go on a trip together.”
re
Ingrid also admitted that her romance with Jean provoked a serious
sP
conflict with her husband when he came home on leave; he had become
suspicious, and she had “confessed her love affair with Grasset.” He had
reproached her, and she promised to end the liaison. The following Sun-
xa
day, she said, she and her husband made up, and she decided to spend
Te
a week with him in his quarters in Freising. But this truce did not last
long. Returning home, Grasset pleaded with her not to end their affair.
He told her that she “was the only woman he had ever genuinely loved,”
of
whereupon she immediately replied that “two hearts that love each other
cannot be separated,” and they resumed their affair. But in mid-August,
ity
when Grasset alerted her about the police raid and the discovery of her
letters and photos, she hurriedly left work and traveled to the nearby Lake
rs
Starnberg to take, as she told the police, her own life. But she was too
ve
frightened to “go into the water”; instead, she cabled her husband, and
ni
he took her home. Although very angry, he nevertheless “declared that

he was prepared to continue to live with me, because I had been a faithful
U
comrade to him in the four years of our marriage and had helped to pay
for his studies.” A week later she was arrested by the police. Again her
17
husband stood by her.

So what made Ingrid seek love with a Frenchman while she was mar-
20
ried to a man who seemed generous and caring? The clue, I think, lies in
the different tone and language that Ingrid employed in her letters to her
©
French lover and in the only surviving letter to her husband, Willy, writ-
ten in September 1941 when she was remanded in prison. She addressed
him as “mein herzensguter, lieber Willy” (my kind-hearted, dear Willy)
and promised him her “honest love and faithfulness.” The letter is full of
contrition and brims with gratitude for standing by her despite her infidelity
(“I wounded your poor heart so deeply”). She knew that prison officials
would scrutinize her letter, and this might have inhibited her. Nevertheless,
it resembles an affectionate letter to a brother rather than to a husband.
Expressions of her ardent love, sensuality, and erotic longing were reserved
for her French lover.
Most of her letters to Jean were composed in excellent French and written
in a beautiful hand. They always started with a particular form of endear-
ment: “mon cher, bon ange” (my dear good angel), “mein Goldengel”
(my gold angel), “mon grand amour” (my great love), “mon aimé Jean”
(my lover, Jean), or, more teasingly, “mon cher grand garcon” (my dear
big boy). She wrote that it was easier for her to “confess my great love to
a sheet of paper than to declare it in a loud voice in front of the person
whom one loves with one’s whole heart.” She confessed that “I love you
and I think of you all the time,” and she signed off by embracing him and
sending the “tenderest of kisses.” In a rare letter in German she told him
that “his happy nature captivates her like hardly anybody had managed
ss
to do before.” In his arms she wanted to savor “all the sweetness of your
re
soul”; close to his chest she could “feel all the beauty of our love.” She
sP
assured him that her love for him was “never-ending,” that she dreamed
of their “quiet happiness” and could not wait until the next meeting. Each
letter ends with an ardent affirmation of romantic love, such as “a thousand
xa
burning hot kisses from your petite Ingrid.”
Te
In her deposition she recounted how Grasset had managed to win her
over in the first place by his “sensitive and tender letters.” I suggest that
her correspondence with her foreign lover provided her with a chance to
of
imagine and celebrate romantic love in ways that would not have to be
tested by a long-term relationship; she expressed her longing for something
ity
she had probably hoped for or even expected all her adult life but had
not found in her marriage. We know that she had married Willy against
rs
her parents’ wishes and that it was on her initiative that he had decided
ve
to study painting rather than remain a decorator. Her own verdict of her
ni
marriage was indeed highly ambivalent: she told police that they “lived
together very companionably.” Admittedly, we cannot rule out that this
U
description might have been a ploy for leniency. It is also impossible to

know whether the absence of children after more than four years of mar-
17
riage signals sexual problems or a lack of commitment. But Willy’s decision

to forgive her because she had been “a faithful comrade” and given him
20
financial support would point to a relationship where passion or romantic

love was no longer alive. Judging from the tone of her letters to Grasset,
©
Ingrid sought romantic love. When the opportunity arose Ingrid transferred
her desires to a target that promised to be safe on many levels: she could
reassure herself that it did not threaten her moral standards, since she only
allowed Grasset to kiss and fondle her but, if she is to be believed, not to
have full sexual intercourse. This facilitated her delusion that she had not
committed adultery. Her manner of communication was safe, because she
could express her romantic love from a distance through pen and paper.
The brief encounters she had with Grasset in person remained but mere
snatched moments of furtive intimacy in hidden corners at their workplace
or on Sundays somewhere out of public view. Ingrid’s real passion was lived
out only within their correspondence. This almost exclusively epistolary

passion surely helped to keep Ingrid’s and Grasset’s dreams alive, and it
probably helped Ingrid’s husband to forgive her.68
Young Women’s Pursuit of Sexual Pleasure

Of course, dreams of romantic love and erotic desire did not happen in a
void. Women (and men) had been conditioned to expect emotional and
sexual fulfillment in heterosexual relationships through innumerable films,
novels, and advice literature from the Weimar to the Nazi era. Michel
Foucault believed that it was sexologists who were primarily responsible
ss
for the dissemination of new insights and the creation of new sexual iden-
re
tities.69 Many of the most innovative sexual scientists and sex reformers
sP
had indeed been active in Weimar Germany, and their publications and
public talks had been hugely influential in professional and official circles,
encouraging the wider public to seek help for reproductive and sexual
xa
problems.70 But the new mass culture was the most effective in reaching
Te
ordinary people, helping them to articulate their own erotic feelings and
hopes. As Lisa Sigel argues with reference to interwar Britain, “Popular
culture—sometimes making use of sexological definitions and sometimes
of
influenced by sexological research but often not—allowed people to read

about sexual pleasures and to write of themselves as sexual actors.”71 Many
ity
German women who fell afoul of the illicit contact regulations during
the Second World War were teenagers during the 1920s and early 1930s
rs
when the new medium of film was popularizing romantic love. This had
ve
previously been a bourgeois ideal and was used by prescriptive literature

ni
to bolster marriage, but in the Weimar Republic romantic love in popular

culture was now also addressed to the lower classes. At the same time
U
Weimar movies conveyed the importance of sexual pleasure for both gen-
ders and not just for men.72
17
68
Letter from prison by I.A. to her husband, 7 September 1941, SAM, Sta.anw. 10476.
20
69
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (Harmondsworth:
Pelican, 1981), 53–73.
70
For overviews of these developments, see Cornelie Usborne, The Politics of the Body:
©
Women’s Reproductive Rights and Duties (London: Macmillan, 1992); Usborne, Cultures of
Abortion in Weimar Germany (London: Berghahn, 2007); and Atina Grossmann, Reforming
Sex: The German Sex Reform Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920–1950
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
71
Lisa Z. Sigel, Making Modern Love: Sexual Narratives and Identities in Interwar Brit-
ain (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012), 3. See also Lucy Bland, Modern Women
on Trial: Sexual Transgression in the Age of the Flapper (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2013); and Alison Oram, Her Husband Was a Woman! Women’s Gender-Crossing in
Modern British Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 2007).
72
See, for example, Cornelie Usborne, “Rebellious Girls and Pitiable Women: Abortion
Narratives in Weimar Popular Culture,” in “Sexuality in Modern German History,” spe-
cial issue, German History 23, no. 3 (2005): 321–39; Richard W. McCormick, Gender and
In the nearly thirteen years of the Third Reich, depending on the criteria
used in collecting statistics, between 1,094 and 1,356 feature films were
produced, and, according to David Welch, “virtually half were either love
stories or comedies.” This illustrates, according to Welch, “Goebbels’ inten-
tions of mixing entertainment with propaganda.”73 During the war romantic
comedies were also important as cinematic escapism for the maintenance of
the morale on the home front. Die große Liebe (The great love), that most
successful of Nazi wartime feature films, was just one important defender
of the role of romantic love, even though, as Elissa Mailänder argues, it
prioritized the love of war over that between men and women.74
Women’s expressions of romantic love for their POW lovers were nur-
ss
tured by a new emphasis on emotional authenticity and passionate feelings
re
in heterosexual relationships among all social classes but also by the regime’s
sP
efforts to keep up morale with the help of popular culture that appealed
to people’s sentiments of longing and desire. When women accused of
illicit contacts freely admitted their erotic yearnings they defied not only
xa
Nazi regulations but also their assigned gender roles. Once convicted they
Te
became victims of state violence by the harsh treatment meted out them
but, as we shall see below, they also exploited the opportunities offered by
the war and the prevailing racial climate to denigrate and endanger their
of
foreign lovers.
ity
Women’s Narratives of Sexual Desire

rs
It is noteworthy that many women interrogated about alleged sexual inter-

ve
course with prisoners not only freely admitted their forbidden relationships
ni
but often stressed their sexual agency rather than presenting themselves
as passive victims of male lust. Once their lovers had been detained and
U
had confessed, some women conceded their active role in shaping the
17
Sexuality in Weimar Modernity: Film Literature, and “New Objectivity” (New York: Palgrave,
2001), esp. 15–38; Grossmann, Reforming Sex.
20
73
David Welch, Propaganda and the German Cinema, 1933–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1984), 43, cited in Jo Fox, Filming Women in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2000), 120. See also Susan Tegel, Nazis and the Cinema (London: Hambledon-
©
Continuum, 2007), 171, 176–78.

74
Die große Liebe (The great love) premiered in Berlin in 1942 and featured Zarah
Leander, the popular Swedish singer who had starred in many German melodramas of the
1930s. It is a love story between a Luftwaffe officer and a singer (Leander) who has to
make many personal sacrifices for the war effort and who understands that personal hap-
piness has to come second to the national need. The other huge box-office success was
Das Wunschkonzert (Request concert), which opened in December 1940 and was another
great love story between a young woman and her fiancé, who is called up to fight. Elissa
Mailänder, “Der NS-Spielfilm ‘Die große Liebe’ (1942): Auftakt zum Vernichtungskrieg
oder Liebeserklärung an den Krieg,” in Montagen zur Herrschaftspraxis in der Klassischen
Moderne: Alltagshistorische Perspektiven und Reflexionen, ed. Maren Büttner, Christine
Hartig, and Tilmann Siebeneichner (Essen: Klartext, 2013), 69–96.
relationship. They admitted that they were neither forced nor raped by
their POW lovers but had consented freely to what one woman termed
“the goings on.” Moreover, they talked about the joy of sex, admitting
that they had “had fun,” and quite a few mentioned their own burning
desire.75 One woman pleaded for understanding on the grounds of her
strong sex drive. She knew of her Serbian lover’s full confession and
declared boldly that she was “in such a state of sexual arousal” that she
“had for a moment lost all inhibitions, that [she] let it happen without
thinking of the consequences.”76 Another woman said that she had toler-
ated intercourse with a POW “only once because she did not like him
but she had an urge to have sex.”77 Of course I am mindful that many
ss
women’s detailed confessions were almost certainly coaxed out of them
re
by voyeuristic gendarmes or Gestapo officers whose questions (which are
sP
not preserved) pressed for more and more lurid details.78 Nevertheless,
even the most embarrassing intimacies offered very reluctantly were not
necessarily fabricated; these officers could demand more evidence but were
xa
unlikely to have invented details.
Te
Even a public prosecutor or a deceived husband seemed to sometimes
have sympathy for a woman’s need for sexual satisfaction if not for the way
she went about achieving it. For example, in 1944 a twenty-eight-year-old
of
married farmer’s daughter was given a sentence of penal servitude for one
year for her intimate contacts with a French POW. This POW was lodging
ity
with the local mayor while he worked as a milker on a dairy farm nearby.
The young woman had been married for five years to a widower thirteen
rs
years her senior. Explaining her motives for her affair to the police, she said
ve
she felt unhappy because her husband “never had an affectionate word for
ni
me and showed no tenderness. Our marital relations take place only rarely
and we have no children.” In contrast, she explained that her French lover
U
was “always tender” and kind and gave her chocolate. While her husband
was still out at work she met her lover every late afternoon in her marital
17
bedroom. Their relationship only came to an abrupt end when one day her
husband returned home early, discovered her in flagrante, and denounced
20
her. When she stood trial the judge explained, rather surprisingly, that
“her substantially older husband had no appreciation of the wishes of the
©
love-starved young wife and had himself as a witness admitted that he had
neglected her.” The husband duly expressed his remorse in his petition for
75
For example, copy of the judgment, n.d. 1944, concerning the unmarried agricultural
worker B.W., SAM, Sta.anw. 13684.
76
Copy of judgment, 7 February 1941, concerning the wife of a beer brewer, P.P., SAM,
St.anw. 9965; a similar case is in copy of the judgment, 19 July 1944, concerning the farmer’s
wife, V.L., SAM, St.anw. 13710.
77
Interrogation by the local constable of the unmarried agricultural worker H.G., 11
June 1944, SAM, Sta.anw. 13737, Bl. 9.
78
For a discussion of how voyeuristic these interrogations could be, see Essner, Die
“Nürnberger Gesetze,” 198.
mercy: “I have forgiven my wife since I now see that my crass negligence
was at fault and caused her to commit a punishable deed. My wife is still
young and inexperienced and in her dissatisfied longing for love she com-
mitted her mistake.”79
Even convinced National Socialists or those married to top-ranking
party men are to be found among women who had embarked on danger-
ous liaisons with POWs. For example, in the winter of 1943–44 a young
teacher of a nursery school, Lena Schäfer, had a passionate love affair with
a French POW, Georges Petit, that lasted many weeks. Despite the fact that
she was about to become a local leader of the BDM, the League of German
Girls, and that her kindergarten was financed by the party, she apparently
ss
did not think twice before inviting her suitor into her workplace—admit-
re
tedly after the children had gone home—where they had sexual intercourse.
sP
When his work command moved Petit away from her village they wrote
to each other lovingly and continued to do so even after he had managed
to return to France. Lena was single and twenty-six and admitted that she
xa
“had taken a liking to the Frenchman”; she described their lovemaking in
Te
considerable detail, even though it had apparently never lasted more than
“five minutes.” She excused her actions by describing how heartbroken she
had been when a 1943 love affair with a German pilot had suddenly come
of
to an end. This loss, she said, had affected her very deeply, and her spirits
were only lifted when she realized that the Frenchman was keen on her. “I
ity
also liked him but nevertheless was not allowed to have him. . . . But I did
not worry too much about the whole matter since he said he would soon
rs
be a civilian worker.”80
ve
Much more sensational was the case that came in front of Munich’s
ni
Special Court in April 1941.81 The session was open to the public, and
those who attended might well have been astonished to hear about the
U
erotic fantasies and sexual exploits of the wife of a senior government officer
working for the Luftwaffe (the German air force) and the daughter of an
17
army major who had joined the National Socialist Party early on and who
had instilled in his daughter the ideals of the movement. Magda Speicher
20
was twenty-eight and the mother of a two-year-old son, the only child from
her six-year marriage. Like her father and her husband she was an ardent
©
fan of Hitler. How embarrassing, then, for the representatives of the regime
to have to try her for committing adultery with a French POW. Her lover,
Bernard Vosges, was a cook from Marseilles whose duties involved provid-
ing meals for other POWs in a public house in a village near Rosenheim.
79
Copy of the judgment, 28 July 1944, concerning the wife of a manual laborer, A.U.,
and petition for mercy, 21 December 1944, by her husband, SAM, Sta.anw. 13747.
80
Copy of the judgment, 1 August 1944, concerning the nursery teacher M.K. and her
interrogation at the Amtsgericht, 1 April 1944, SAM, Sta.anw. 13743.
81
Copy of the judgment by the Special Court at the Landgericht I, Munich, 22 April
1941, concerning the wife of a high-ranking government official, M.R., SAM, Sta.anw. 9610.
As it happened, Magda had previously moved to the same village when

her husband’s work relocated there, but shortly before Magda started her
extramarital affair her husband had been moved to Stuttgart. Anybody
listening to the bill of indictment as it was read out in court was treated to
extraordinarily lurid details of a torrid love affair and unusual sexual prac-
tices, including cunnilingus and other “unnatural habits.” Magda asserted
that she had originally only invited Bernard into her home to “convert
him into a Nazi” and to tell him how “the Führer selflessly puts his entire
life and his energy in the service for Germany.” This was risible, since it
was actually the Frenchman who had converted a Nazi housewife into a
“sex addict.” The court heard how Magda, once she had succumbed to
ss
Bernard’s pleadings, spent many “passionate” nights (usually from 10:00
re
p.m. to circa 3:00 a.m.) with her foreign lover several times a week in her
sP
marital bed while her son and her “hard-of-hearing” mother-in-law slept
in adjacent rooms. There was no possibility that Magda had been taken
advantage of by a POW. It was she who had taken the initiative to invite
xa
him one evening and then offered him cake, liqueur, and cigarettes while
Te
ostensibly trying to convert him to Nazism. Soon enough, however, she
admitted, she danced with him to a gramophone record and eventually
ended up having sex with him on the sofa. Her preparations for the next
of
meeting and all subsequent assignments were meticulous, betraying both

her thoroughness and her eagerness: she organized a secret passage for
ity
Bernard to move unseen around her house and a way for him to climb
up to her bedroom, where she welcomed him already undressed and duly
rs
fitted with a pessary to avoid an unwanted pregnancy. She confided in her

ve
best friend, who later acted as a witness and passed this information on to
ni
the police; she told her that she had become obsessed with Bernard and
that her initial resistance to his erotic overtures had simply “melted away.”
U
Magda’s account to her girlfriend displays her relentless romantic pursuit

to fulfill her desire and to experience sexual pleasure. She described to her
17
how after the first lovemaking, “despite pangs of conscience, she felt in a
state of enchantment [Verzauberung], and this stopped her from evading
20
his entreaties.” Her friend told the police that Magda was compelled “to
think about him all the time during the following week and to look for him
©
in the garden or the pub, she simply had to be near him.” The friend also
recounted that Magda had assured her that she “cannot understand her
own behavior toward the Frenchman except that there was some kind of
power of suggestion that the prisoner had exercised over her.” Interestingly,
the judge himself employed the image of “sexual bondage” as a mitigating
circumstance for her adultery, noting that “the accused wanted to play with
fire and finally succumbed to fire. A certain enchantment resides in every
fiery love between two people, and every loving woman is attracted to her
lover and will look out for him and seek his vicinity.”82
82
Ibid.
Magda’s narrative, repeated by her best friend from Magda’s letters to

her, illustrates perfectly the trajectory from lacking any “interest in physical
passion” to one of dramatic sexual awakening in the hands of an apparently
skillful French lover. She married a husband who was, in her words, “dear
[lieb], good, and very conscientious and very sensitive; as far as women are
concerned he was very inexperienced.” She said she liked this, since she
herself was “pure and wanted this of my husband.” But her marital rela-
tions soon proved disappointing as well as sterile, and she was duly sent to
a doctor to be cured of “her frigidity” without, however, much success.
She admitted to her friend (and later to the police officer) that she “loved
her husband emotionally [seelisch] but had never found full harmony and
ss
satisfaction in the physical aspect of this love.” It was only her French lover
re
who knew how to ignite in her “the flame of passion.” Such an expression
sP
could easily have been lifted from a number of contemporary romantic
films or novels. Once Magda had experienced erotic satisfaction she seemed
to have thrown all caution to the wind and pursued any opportunity to
xa
enjoy it to the full. This would suggest that she regarded her erotic needs
Te
as an important right, rules of bourgeois morality or directives from above
notwithstanding.
Her lover, Bernard Vosges, was twenty-seven and had married shortly
of
before the war. In his interrogation by the police, he coolly dismissed his
affair with Magda as little more than the consequence of his “sex drive.”
ity
He “had not loved Frau Speicher but had only regarded her as his mis-
tress. . . . His wife was more beautiful than Frau Speicher and he loved
rs
her.” He also claimed that it was Magda rather than he who had started
ve
their relationship and that she was immediately receptive to his physical
ni
overtures. Every time they met, he said, they “embraced and kissed and
had intercourse three times a night.”83 Vosges’s judgment of his German
U
mistress is similar to many other similar statements by POWs. Not a few

foreigners who had been apprehended for illicit sex and interrogated as-
17
serted that their German mistresses not only had initiated the affair but
had even pestered them with coarse invitations and titillating hints. Some
20
described how they had been physically dragged off to some secret place
to have intercourse and how sex was demanded more frequently than they
©
were prepared to offer it.84 While such talk was almost certainly designed
to diminish their own culpability, we should, I suggest, not dismiss such
claims completely. Frequently, women themselves admitted to their active
collusion or even dominant role in a sexual affair. Some women contrived
to become pregnant, even though it is not always clear whether their lover
had agreed. A thirty-five-year-old divorcée who was the daughter of an
83
Ibid.
84
Interrogation by the local constable, 20 April 1944, concerning the widow of a gar-
dener, F.M., SAM, Sta.anw. 13742, Bl. 2; see also Arnaud, “Die deutsch-französischen
Liebesbeziehungen,” 189–93.
officer and mother of two children and who worked as an administrator in

a state insurance company, was not the only one who deliberately chose to
become pregnant by her French POW sweetheart, even though she knew
that he was already married with children. Even after he had escaped back
to France and she had stopped receiving messages from him, she said she
was proud to give birth to his son because she “loved him.”85
While the liberal climate of the Weimar Republic had stimulated popular
engagement with sex reform, the era of the Third Reich was not neces-
sarily sexually repressive or prudish. On the contrary, Hans Peter Bleuel
and, more recently, Dagmar Herzog have argued that the regime was not
“antisex,” or, as Elizabeth Heineman put it, it “provided sexual opportunity
ss
as well as sexual repression.” But as all of these authors make clear, these
re
opportunities were of course strictly limited to those considered geneti-
sP
cally “desirable.”86 The regime indeed used sexual license to implement its
eugenic and racist policies. Herzog suggests that members of the National
Socialist regime continued a “perpetuation, expansion, and intensification of
xa
pre-existing liberalizing trends,” which they aimed to harness to their own
Te
“racist, elitist, and homophobic agenda.”87 She points to “Nazi affirmations
of sexual pleasure both within and outside marriage” in, for example, SS
publications like Das Schwarze Korps, which ran counter to the churches’
of
and the bourgeoisie’s attempts to channel sexuality into safe boundaries

within marriage.88 There are a number of caveats to this view of a prosex
ity
regime in that its policies were not only racist but also highly gendered. Nazi
leaders were less, if at all, concerned with improving female sexual pleasure
rs
than, in Annette Timm’s words, with insuring that “‘valuable’ male citizens
ve
(and other men temporarily useful as laborers) were sexually satisfied.”

ni
Since “the male’s sexual gratification was deemed to take precedence over
the female’s,” the regime helped to perpetuate sexual double standards.89
U
For example, unmarried women were thought to be undeserving of erotic

satisfaction, or, as Heineman puts it, “healthy, fertile Aryans who chose not
17
to marry could not be full members of the Volksgemeinschaft.”90 And while

20
85
Police interrogation, n.d. [1944], of the unmarried milker and mother of three, B.W.;
and copy of the judgment, 21 August 1944, SAM, Sta.anw. 13745. Similar cases can be
found in SAM, Sta.anw. 13690, 13692, 13703, 13706, 13709, 13719, where fathers were
©
French or Serbian POWs, etc.

86
Hans-Peter Bleuel, Sex and Society in Nazi Germany (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1973);
Dagmar Herzog, “Hubris and Hypocrisy, Incitement and Disavowal: Sexuality and German
Fascism,” in Herzog, Sexuality and German Fascism, 1–21, 16; and Elizabeth Heineman,
“Sexuality and Nazism: The Doubly Unspeakable?,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 11,
no. 1/2 (2002): 22–66, 31.
87
Herzog, “Hubris and Hypocrisy,” 4.
88
Dagmar Herzog, Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Ger-
many (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 16.
89
Timm, “Sex with a Purpose,” 226.
90
Elizabeth Heineman, What Difference Does a Husband Make? Women and Marital
Status in Nazi and Postwar Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 26.
racially approved husbands were encouraged to have extramarital affairs

and even illegitimate children as long as they were fit for the “master race,”
it was made more difficult for women to escape a loveless marriage and
form a new relationship.91 Moreover, important sexual rights bestowed on
women in the Weimar Republic, such as better access to birth control and
abortion as well as a more enlightened regulation of prostitution, were all
reversed by the National Socialist regime.92 Mark Fenemore has criticized
Herzog for ignoring the disempowerment of women in the racial state
and for risking “falling prey to a masculinist discourse that legitimates and
condones the objectification of women and which equates sexual pleasure
with male pleasure.”93 Robert Waite’s earlier research also calls into ques-
ss
tion the image of the Third Reich as sexually permissive. He demonstrated
re
that National Socialist leaders, far from happy with promiscuous young
sP
people, especially but not only teenage homosexuality, set out to control
their sexual behavior in ways “guided by traditional bourgeois values and
morality.”94 These apparent inconsistencies within the regime have often
xa
been commented on: some Nazis, like Himmler, promoted sex outside
Te
marriage, while others decried it as immoral; while eugenically fit Aryans
were encouraged to reproduce and to enjoy sex, those considered racially
inferior were sexually repressed.95 So I would contend that young women
of
who had illicit contacts were unlikely to have felt encouraged by the regime’s
“prosex” climate; their transnational romances were, after all, criminalized
ity
and brutally punished, and it was extremely rare that their excuse of a strong
sex drive was rated by the judiciary as a mitigating factor for their love af-
rs
fairs with POWs.96 On the contrary, their actions challenged the regime’s
ve
Umgangsverbote and, by implication, its racist and misogynist politics and

ni
propaganda, even if this was an unintended outcome, and most women were
motivated by self-gratification rather than political defiance. Nevertheless,
U
their sexual escapades also challenged the received opinion that male lust
was uncontrollable and women’s was not, as is clear in their intolerance of
17
husbands who were bad lovers.

But there is no doubt that erotic yearnings in the Third Reich might have
20
been fueled by a popular culture that was largely given free rein, as Herzog
91
On 28 October 1939 Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, issued an order encouraging
©
members of the SS and the police to procreate “eugenically valuable” children, if necessary
outside wedlock, cited in Heineman, What Difference, 31.
92
To quote just two example of the voluminous literature: Gabriele Czarnowski, “Wom-
en’s Crimes, State Crimes: Abortion in Nazi Germany,” in Arnot and Usborne, Gender
and Crime, 238–56; and Gisela Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus (Opladen:
Westdeutscher Verlag, 1986).
93
Mark Fenemore, “The Recent Historiography of Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Ger-
many,” Historical Journal 32, no. 3 (2009): 763–79, 775.
94
Robert G. Waite, “Teenage Sexuality in Nazi Germany,” Journal of the History of Sexu-
ality 8, no. 3 (1998): 434–76, 474.
95
See, for example, Elizabeth D. Heineman, “Sexuality and Nazism,” 30.
96
For example, SAM, Sta.anw. 13747, note 80; or SAM, Sta.anw. 9610, note 83.
asserts, to entertain with sexually charged stories in what some called “lurid
and salacious” details.97 Even though Weimar culture was condemned as
“decadent and degenerate,” some Weimar cultural forms remarkably sur-
vived Nazi censorship. For instance, cabaret revues, with their highly erotic
content, were still common, even if they were adapted to fit the reigning
militarism and racial ideology. Another example is expressionist dance, in
which female eroticism and nudity were freely employed, albeit in a form
considered to represent “natural” and “racially healthy” nudity. But, as
Terri Gordon argues, the performance art carried out “a twofold opera-
tion whereby it simultaneously met audience expectations and desires and
redirected them into the interests of the larger Gemeinschaft [community],
ss
i.e. channelled sexual desire into racially approved paths.”98 It was prob-
re
ably the medium of film where mass audiences witnessed representations
sP
of female sexuality most at odds with women’s sanctioned roles as wife and
mother. This was, as Antje Ascheid explains, because films depicting “the
virtuous maiden and self-sacrificing mother . . . generally failed to attract
xa
and titillate contemporary audiences, who preferred the ‘dangerous’ images
of Hollywood glamour and cosmopolitan allure.”99 Te
The war itself played a major role in shaping the way young women
constructed themselves vis-à-vis men in general and boyfriends or husbands
of
and indeed POWs in particular. The increasing disruption of war had made
lapses in morality more common and illicit contacts much easier, disman-
ity
tling, as Herzog argues, the “traditional constraints and communal and

familiar monitoring mechanisms.”100 Public opinion reports assembled by
rs
Himmler’s security service (SD) described the public’s heightened anxiety

ve
about the decline in sexual mores, blaming “the length of the war” and ac-
ni
cusing “a large number of women and girls” for being “ever more inclined
to live it up sexually,” especially with foreign men. How would news of
U
their wives’ promiscuity affect the morale of troops at the front, intelligence
officials wondered?101 The SD demanded that the Ministry of Propaganda
17
“deeroticize” press, radio, and film reports and ban songs with “erotic”
couplets. Military authorities had apparently received numerous letters
20
from war wives requesting that their husbands be granted home leave, as
they would otherwise need to become unfaithful.102 As recent research on
©
wartime correspondence has shown, conscripts at the front attached great

97
Herzog, “Hubris and Hypocrisy,” 1.
98
Terri J. Gordon, “Fascism and the Female Form: Performance Art in the Third Reich,”
in Herzog, Sexuality and German Fascism, 164–200, 166.
99
Antje Ascheid, Hitler’s Heroines: Stardom and Womanhood in Nazi Cinema (Philadel-
phia: Temple University Press, 2003), 4, 8.
100
Dagmar Herzog, introduction to Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s
Twentieth Century, ed. Dagmar Herzog (London: Palgrave, 2009), 5.
101
MadR, 6481–8, 13 April 1944, cited in Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Na-
tion under Arms, 1939–1945 (London: The Bodley Head, 2015), 421.
102
Stargardt, The German War, 422.
importance to their communication with women at home, often writing

touching love letters.103 Many of the women wrote back about their own
feelings of distress by the absence of their husbands or fiancés for long
periods of time. The increasing fear of their partners’ imminent death on
the battlefield made them long for love and sexual pleasure. One woman
wrote to her distraught husband that she was fed up with waiting for him,
nor did she need to: “I could have four men, if I wanted, at any time. I’ve
had enough, I want it now too!”104 The daily threat of bombings toward
the end of the war tended to encourage people to seek “earthly satisfaction”
wherever possible. Since they feared the end was nigh and time was short, it
made sense to live life to the fullest. One woman from northern Germany
ss
who was evacuated to a village in Upper Bavaria described her adultery
re
with a POW in these terms: “When the world collapses everywhere, then
sP
traditional morality no longer makes sense. Once you stare death in the face
and there is a chance to experience happiness of love, then you grasp this
with both hands.”105 These heightened emotions were combined with the
xa
frisson of an illicit sexual relationship with a man who made a woman feel
Te
desirable and who had the allure of a foreigner, especially if he was French;
as Ulrich Herbert has noted, the sex “appeal of French men apparently had
an almost mythic dimension.”106
of
Power relations had certainly shifted in sexual relations between men and
women during the war. As we have seen, some wives demanded that their
ity
husbands be more attentive and employ better erotic skills, while others
claimed the same rights to sexual satisfaction that had been traditionally
rs
considered the prerogative of men. Women expressed their resentment at the

ve
continuing double standard of sexual morality; why, they asked, should men
ni
at the front have access to Wehrmacht brothels or to indigenous women’s

sexual favors in the occupied countries when the women themselves were
U
expected to remain faithful?107 In 1943 a social worker at a Hamburg care

center thought that “the unbridled sex life of soldiers should be blamed for
17
the unfaithfulness of their wives. . . . These women often believe that what
20
103
See, for example, Christa Hämmerle, “Gewalt und Liebe—ineinander verschränkt:
Paarkorrespondenzen aus zwei Weltkriegen: 1914/18 und 1939/45,” in Bauer and
Hämmerle, Liebe schreiben, 171–230; and Ulrike Jureit, “Zwischen Ehe und Männerbund:
©
Emotionale und sexuelle Beziehungsmuster im Zweiten Weltkrieg,” Werkstatt Geschichte 22

(1999): 61–73.
104
Cited in Stargardt, The German War, 421.
105
Copy of the interrogation by the local constable, n.d. [1944], SAM, Sta.anw.
13754, Bl. 4.
106
Herbert, Hitler’s Foreign Workers, 125. See also Arnaud, “Die deutsch-französischen
Liebesbeziehungen.”
107
On the access of German soldiers to sexual gratification through prostitution or forced
encounters with occupied populations, see Timm, “Sex with a Purpose”; and Birgit Beck,
“Sexual Violence and Its Prosecution by Courts Martial of the Wehrmacht,” in A World at
Total War: Global Conflict and the Politics of Destruction, 1937–1945, ed. Roger Chickering
and Stig Förster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 317–31.
the man does, they should also be permitted to do.”108 When a young Ger-
man woman was publicly shamed for having sex with a Frenchman, other
women watching “ventured to ask whether the same would be done to a
man who had an affair with a French woman while in France.”109 In a reversal
of prescribed bourgeois gender norms and perhaps as a consequence of the
power relationships brought about by the war, many women also seem to
have occupied the dominant role in a relationship. Far from being passive,
shy, or prudish, they appeared frequently as the instigators of sex.110 They
also implied that extramarital sex was their due and a legitimate source of
excitement and pride. They often delighted in sharing their experiences
with their girlfriends, comparing the sexual prowess of their lovers as if
ss
participating in a competition.111
re
But there was more to this. In their work on sexuality between German
sP
soldiers and indigenous women in occupied wartime Poland and Soviet
Russia, Maren Röger and Regina Mühlhäuser, respectively, have rightly
warned against romanticizing consensual relations that often involved
xa
asymmetric power relationships. We must recognize that the relationships
Te
between German women and POWs were unequal because they were made
possible by the unusual circumstances provided by the war and framed by
ideology that automatically elevated German women above men who were
of
foreign and considered genetically undesirable.112 Within the ideology of

the racial state, German women were part of the Herrenvolk—the master
ity
race—and this made it possible for them to lord it over their foreign lovers,
who were naturally in a subservient position due to their status as prisoners,
rs
as war enemies on German territory, and as racial “others.” This scenario

ve
certainly enabled sexual exploitation by German women of “alien” outsiders

ni
as lovers. Even if women merely responded to the invitation of POWs and

entered into consensual affairs, many of them, whether consciously or not,
U
replicated paradigms of domination and submission exercised by the Nazi

17
108
Dr. Käthe Petersen, 17 February 1943, cited in Kundrus, “Die Unmoral,” 100.
109
Cited in Kundrus, “Forbidden Company,” 210.
20
110
For example, see the copy of the interrogation of the Polish POW S.C., 9 March 1941,
and of the farmer’s daughter, A.K., 9 March 1941, who was accused of having pursued a
much younger Polish POW for sex and rewarding him with presents of food and money,
©
SAM, Sta.anw. 10441, Bl. 1, 3.

111
See, for example, deposition of the interrogation by the Gestapo of the married wom-
an A.W., 4 March 1941, together with her colleague T.G., SAM, Sta.anw. 9984, Bl. 7v. They
organized their respective sexual encounters with their French POW lovers and decided on
food and drink with which to entertain them on their nightly visits to their homes; they usu-
ally met in the morning after such adventures to compare their lovemaking and how many
times they had intercourse.
112
Several historians have pointed this out: Mühlhäuser, Eroberung; Röger, “Sexual Poli-
cies”; Röger, Kriegsbeziehungen; and Gabriele Czarnowski, “Zwischen Germanisierung und
Vernichtung: Verbotene polnisch-deutsche Liebesbezhiehungen und die Rekonstruktion des
Volkskörpers im Zweiten Weltkrieg,” in Die Gegenwart der NS Vergangenheit, ed. Helgard
Kramer (Berlin: Philo, 2000), 295–303.
state on those whom they regarded as racially inferior; thus women were
complicit in the racism of the Third Reich or, worse, exploited it for their
own ends. Some no doubt availed themselves of new erotic opportunities
to forge intimate relations with men who were far away from home, had
lost their freedom and social status, and were thus at the women’s mercy for
comfort and affection. This may well explain why so many women took the
initiative in forging romantic unions and why they talked so unsentimentally
about their exploits to other women they could trust because they were
involved in similar pursuits.
But sexual relations with POWs from Eastern Europe harbored more
deadly consequences. Most of those convicted for sexual contacts with pris-
ss
oners admitted in their interrogations that they had been aware of the bans
re
and punishments.113 It must therefore be assumed that women who took up
sP
with Polish or Soviet POWs also knew the extreme danger their dalliances
posed for their lovers. From the summer of 1940 Polish POWs who had
infringed the Umgangsverbote had to undergo a racial medical examination,
xa
and if they were deemed “fit for Germanization,” they were only sent to a
Te
concentration camp for a brief period. In some cases they were even permit-
ted to marry their German mistresses, and they often went unpunished. If,
however, they failed their racial test, Polish men were normally executed
of
in public; they were “hanged from a tree as a warning to others” or by the

roadside, where crowds of Germans could watch.114 Soviets charged with
ity
these crimes were executed in concentration camps. Given the harshness

of these punishments, one could accuse their German mistresses of having
rs
exercised coercion or even a form of violence against them.

ve
ni
Conclusions
U
A not inconsiderable number of young German women, single or married,

with or without children, mostly but not always of the lower classes, entered
17
into sexual relationships with POWs. I have attempted here to unravel the
various meanings of and contradictory impulses for these encounters as they
20
emerge in the depositions and letters left behind by the women’s trials and
with the help of the concept of emotional economy. In a highly gendered
©
manner, the nationalization of women’s honor facilitated the punishment of

female deviance by the Nazi authorities, as well as by wronged husbands, if
they so chose, while women constructed their own stories rarely in terms of
honor and shame but rather in terms of romantic love and sexual pleasure.
Especially in their letters but also in their statements, women used these
113
I had difficulty locating judicial files for Polish POWs, but among those few I found
there is evidence that some Polish POWs may have been ignorant of the penalties for illicit
contacts, since warning posters were often exclusively in German. See, for example, SAM,
Sta.anw. 10441.
114
Herbert, Hitler’s Foreign Workers, 131–32. See also Gellately, Backing Hitler, 172–
73, 176.
narratives to speak of their longing for and even rights to love, and they
expressed their sexual desire and their sense of self. The production of docile
women’s bodies to protect them from foreign or racial defilements and to
be regulated for their procreative behavior and sexuality was central to the
National Socialist state, especially during wartime.115 The evidence I have
presented here demonstrates that women often refused to submit to the
state’s attempt to discipline and normalize the female body, even if their
actions arose out of selfish rather than political motivations; in the tension
between the demands for self-discipline and the desire for self-expression
the latter often won. How women claimed and indeed appropriated what
was more commonly thought to be (sexual) male privilege and how they
ss
acknowledged their own sex drive and their rights to satisfy it is of consider-
re
able symbolic significance. These remarkable testimonies signify a profound
sP
change in gender hierarchy and gendered behavior. The trial records of these
moments of illicit sexual contact reveal that women were assuming sexual
autonomy in a manner that was dramatically at odds with the racial program
xa
of a regime that was seeking to intervene directly and control the private
Te
sphere in the interest of creating a “master race.” The erotic adventures of
young women must have startled all those who learned about them from
women’s own accounts. Josef Bartl, with whom this article began, was
of
certainly not the only German husband who reacted with bitterness when
told that his bride had enjoyed extramarital sexual pleasures that most men
ity
still counted as an exclusively male privilege.

rs
ve
About the Author

ni
C o r n e l i e U s b o r n e is professor emerita of history at Roehampton

University and senior research fellow at the Institute of Historical Research,
U
University of London. She has published widely on modern German social

and cultural history, especially the history of sexuality. Some of her recent
17
publications include articles in History and Theory, Cultural and Social

History, and Historical Social Research. She is the author of Cultures of
20
Abortion in Weimar Germany (Berghahn, 2007). She is currently research-

ing the cultural history of women’s sexuality in Weimar and Nazi Germany.
©
115
My work on the history of abortion yielded evidence of women resisting Nazi ex-
hortations, threats, and punitive legislation by continuing to prevent the birth of unwanted
children through contraception but also abortion. Usborne, Cultures of Abortion, 216–23.
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it is only all lies.1

married after a long engagement. On their return from their honeymoon

guilty by the Nazi Special Court in Munich of having “grossly offended

Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 26, No. 3, September 2017

romantic love in consensual relationships, as seen from women’s own

as victims of violence.2 A number of important studies of war-time social

relations between civilians and foreigners forcibly brought to the Reich

have informed my work, although they primarily discussed systematic

Weltkrieg,” in Gewalt im Krieg: Ausübung, Erfahrung und Verweigerung von Gewalt in

(Paderborn: Schöningh, 2004); Regina Mühlhäuser, Eroberungen, Sexuelle Gewalttaten und

“illicit contacts” has recently received attention, particularly in various local

2. Weltkriegs,” Die Ortenau 71 (1991): 645–78; Andreas Heusler, “‘Strafbestand’ Liebe:

Kriegsgefangenen,” in Faschismus und Rassissmus: Kontroversen um Ideologie und Opfer, ed.

nocent consensual relationships between German women and their foreign

by throughout the approximately thirty minutes the two couples spent in

on the ground, and I lay on it while he carried out sexual intercourse on

Decrees against unerlaubter Umgang

without husbands, fiancés, boyfriends, or potential sexual partners. At the

(Wehrkraftzersetzung). As the number of foreign laborers and prisoners in

and Germany, 1914–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 51.

reason why Poles and Soviet Russians are underrepresented in my research.

POWs into Germany, 200,000 at the beginning of July, 600,000 by mid-

enforce. As a result, there were plenty of opportunities for Western pris-

also sent to a concentration camp.22

standard remained, German women as “the primary bearers of racial honor

sign a receipt. It exhorted them to safeguard “the purity of German blood”

and to remain “racially conscious” in the face of the presence of inferior

into officialese? Moreover, these interrogations occurred during total war

ency toward those suspected of threatening the purity of German blood.

In this climate of heightened moral and political panic, were confessions

narratives be unearthed from potentially unreliable documents?

interrogations. First, I checked whether there was extraneous evidence to

became involved at a later stage, as sometimes happened, it made a differ-

My third test related to unwitting testimony. A woman’s statement

appeared more authentic when it contained an unintentional admission

of culpability. For example, women often offered rather naive excuses or

Honor and Shame

scrutinize the meaning of “romantic love” and “erotic desire” to probe

and as a professional soldier and party supporter it is not surprising that

(often known simply as the Blutschutzgesetz—blood protection law). It

prohibited interracial sex in order to prevent Rassenschande (literally, “racial

miscegenation as a national shame was of course not new. It had surfaced

accused of racial defilement were thus exposed to onlookers and mocking

Although pillory punishments were outlawed by most German states in the

good order” that had been endangered by “shameful behavior of individu-

thereby create a new form of justice—arbitrary, situational, and supported

in December 1941 on the personal intervention of Hitler, who feared

romantic love, sociologists have included such characteristics as the “claim

emotional sentiments or the combination of marriage and love.”54 In her

sexual revolution; it provided the necessary conditions for such change.”

tional intimacy became increasingly valorized as the key to happiness, [and]

decisive factor in choosing a partner; this was helped by wartime conditions

As practical aspects of relationships receded in the quest for personal and

long-term commitments and led to a rise in divorce and promiscuity.55 But

acter.” Other official observers, however, admitted that “the majority of

families.”59 According to a December 1943 report by the Security Service

tions, then the accused include also stenographers, housekeepers, estate

Nevertheless, the opinion was widespread that young women’s sexual